Sarah Paulson Takes Out a Personal Ad in the Craigslist Killer Movie

We all know Craigslist as the spot to find free couches in various states of disrepair, apartment sublets when all other options have been exhausted, and an endless stream of amusing-to-disturbing personal ads. But it wasn’t too long ago that the pages of the popular listing site were the site of a crime even more nefarious than knowingly selling a queen-sized mattress full of bed bugs.

In his book Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, Robert Kolker details the case of the so-called Craigslist Ripper, a serial killer who murdered a suspected 10 to 16 women over the course of 20 years without getting caught. Also known as the Gilgo Beach Killer due to his presumed residence of Long Island and habit of dumping the bodies along the Ocean Parkway, the murderer targeted women in the sex trade using the popular listing site, adding a salacious twist to an already juicy true-crime story.

Today brings the news that the lurid case of the Craigslist Ripper and his high-price victims will soon get the big screen treatment, and Deadlinereports that Sarah Paulson is set to take the lead role. Wait, no, come back, stop twerking against the nearest wall — she’s not playing the killer, regrettably. Paulson will portray Mari, the mother of one of the victims, and undertake a dogged quest to find justice for her missing daughter Shannan. The as-of-now untitled film (I hope they go with Lost Girls, just for the dumb jokes I’ll make about the sexually explicit graphic novel of the same name) will mark the narrative-feature debut of Liz Garbus, already an Oscar nominee for her Nina Simone documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?

That sounds like a fine pairing of director and star, and Garbus clearly knows her way around multifaceted women. While the chances that this film will be a tenth as good as the unimpeachable 2011 Lifetime Original Movie The Craigslist Killer are slim, keep an eye out for it anyway.